Best Magazine Reads: Remembering Gram Parsons

Gram Parsons has always left me spellbound. Songs like “Brass Buttons,” “The New Soft Shoe,” “She,” “A Song for You, and “Streets of Baltimore” are songs made by someone who must have been out of his mind and body as a young man who essentially invented the genre of so-called alt-country, even if the man himself tended to call it “Cosmic American Music.”

Parsons died 50 years ago this month and MOJO Magazine has a great memorial article titled “Cry One More Time.” Here are some of the best nuggets of info:

• He had big hands!
• Before music, Parsons grew up in 20,000 person swampy Waycross, Georgia as a kid of parents rich from his grandparents’ Florida fruit fortunes. His mom was called Big Avis and his dad was Coon Dog, a World War II veteran who killed himself two days before Christmas 1958.
• Parsons had been “kicked out of The Byrds, fled his own Flying Burrito Brothers, and been booted from a Rolling Stones bacchanal in France.”
• He had a major trust fund, but everyone else around him didn’t. So priorities were a problem for the rockers surrounding Parsons.

  

  Emmylou and Gram

  
  
• At one point, Emmylou Harris became his muse and the two of them played a bunch to practically nobody at Clyde’s in Washington D.C.
• When his band started to tour on his debut solo release GP, Gram was blitzed on cocaine and the band barely rehearsed. The so-called Fallen Angels band was derailed nearly as soon as it began.
• Eventually they got their act together and wowed Neil Young and Linda Ronstadt in Austin, and the two even joined them on stage, later inviting Parsons and his band to “an all-night hootenanny.”
• In the end, after his Grievous Angel album release, “he was falling apart. He didn’t get what he needed growing up” even though his colorful parents were well off financially “and he wasn’t strong enough to survive Hollywood.”